the trawnbeighs were the sort of people who “dressed for dinner” even when, as sometimes happened, they had no dinner in the house to dress for. it is perhaps unnecessary to add that the trawnbeighs were english. indeed, on looking back, i often feel that to my first apparently flippant statement it is unnecessary to add anything. for to one who knew mr. and mrs. trawnbeigh, edwina, violet, maud and cyril, it was the first and last word on them; their alpha and omega, together with all that went between. not that the statement is flippant, far from it. there is in it a seriousness, a profundity, an immense philosophic import. at times it has almost moved me to lift my hat, very much as one does for reason of state, or religion, or death.
this, let me hasten to explain, is not at all the way i feel when i put on evening clothes myself, which i do at least twice out of my every three hundred and sixty-five opportunities. no born american could feel that way about his own dress coat. he sometimes thinks he does; he often—and isn’t it boresome?—pretends he does. but he really doesn’t. as a matter of unimportant fact, the born american may have “dressed” every evening of his grown up life. but if he found himself on an isolated, played out mexican coffee and vanilla finca, with a wife, four children, a tiled roof that p. 146leaked whenever there was a norther, an unveiled sala, through the bamboo partitions of which a cold, wet wind howled sometimes for a week at a time, with no money, no capacity for making any, no prospects and no cook—under these depressing circumstances it is impossible to conceive of an american dressing for dinner every night at a quarter before seven in any spirit but one of ghastly humor.
with the trawnbeighs’ performance of this sacred rite, however, irony and humor had nothing to do. the trawnbeighs had a robust sense of fun (so, i feel sure, have pumpkins and turnips and the larger varieties of the nutritious potato family), but humor, when they didn’t recognize it, bewildered them, and it always struck them as just a trifle underbred, when they did.
trawnbeigh had come over to mexico—“come out from england,” he would have expressed it—as a kind of secretary to his cousin, sir somebody something, who was building a harbor or a railway or a canal (i don’t believe trawnbeigh himself ever knew just what it was) for a british company down in the hot country.
mrs. trawnbeigh, with her young, was to follow on the next steamer a month later; and as she was in mid-ocean when sir somebody suddenly died of yellow fever, she did not learn of this inopportune event until it was too late to turn back. still, i doubt whether she would have turned back if she could. for, as trawnbeigh once explained to me, at a time when they literally hadn’t enough to eat (a hailstorm had not only destroyed his coffee crop but had frozen the roots of most of his trees, and the price of vanilla had fallen from ten cents a p. 147bean to three and a half), leaving england at all had necessitated “burning their bridges behind them.” he did not tell me the nature of their bridges nor whether they had made much of a blaze. in fact, that one, vague, inflammatory allusion was the nearest approach to a personal confidence trawnbeigh was ever known to make in all his fifteen years of mexican life.
the situation, when he met mrs. trawnbeigh and the children on the dock at vera cruz, was extremely dreary, and at the end of a month it had grown much worse, although the trawnbeighs apparently didn’t think so. they even spoke and wrote as if their affairs were looking up a bit. for, after a few weeks of visiting among kindly compatriots at vera cruz and rebozo, mrs. trawnbeigh became cook for some english engineers (there were seven of them) in a sizzling, mosquitoey, feverish mudhole on the isthmus of tehuantepec.
the trawnbeighs didn’t call it cook! neither did the seven engineers. i don’t believe the engineers even thought of it as cook. what mrs. trawnbeigh thought of it will never be known. how could they, when that lady, after feeding the four little trawnbeighs (or rather the four young trawnbeighs; they had never been little) a meal i think they called “the nursery tea,” managed every afternoon, within the next two hours, first, to create out of nothing a perfectly edible dinner for nine persons, and, secondly, to receive them all at seven forty-five, in a red-striped, lemon satin ball gown (it looked like poisonous wall paper), eleven silver bangles, a cameo necklace, with an ostrich tip sprouting from the top of her head?
p. 148trawnbeigh, too, was in evening clothes; and they didn’t call it cooking; they spoke of it as “looking after the mess” or “keeping an eye on the young chaps’ livers.” nevertheless, mrs. trawnbeigh, daughter of the late, the honorable cyril cosby godolphin dundas and the late clare walpurga emmeline moate, cooked—and cooked hard—for almost a year; at the end of which time she was stricken with what she was pleased to refer to as “a bad go of fevah.”
fortunately they were spared having to pass around the hat, although it would have amounted to that if trawnbeigh hadn’t, after the pleasant english fashion, “come into some money.” in the united states, people know to a cent what they may expect to inherit; and then they sometimes don’t get it. but in england there seems to be an endless succession of retired and unmarried army officers who die every little while in jermyn street and leave two thousand pounds to a distant relative they have never met. something like this happened to trawnbeigh, and on the prospect of his legacy he was able to pull out of the tehuantepec mudhole and restore his wife to her usual state of health in the pure and bracing air of rebozo.
various things can be done with two thousand pounds, but just what shall be done ought to depend very largely on whether they happen to be one’s first two thousand or one’s last. trawnbeigh, however, invested his (“interred” would be a more accurate term) quite as if they never would be missed. the disposition to be a country gentleman was in trawnbeigh’s blood. indeed, the first impression one received from the family was that everything they did was in their blood. it never p. 149seemed to me that trawnbeigh had immediately sunk the whole of his little fortune in the old, small, and dilapidated coffee finca so much because he was dazzled by the glittering financial future the shameless owner (another englishman, by the way) predicted for him, as because to own an estate and live on it was, so to speak, his natural element.
he had tried, while mrs. trawnbeigh was cooking on the isthmus, to get something to do. but there was really nothing in mexico he could do. he was splendidly strong, and, in the united states, he very cheerfully and with no loss of self-respect or point of view would have temporarily shoveled wheat or coal, or driven a team, or worked on the street force, as many another englishman of noble lineage has done before and since, but in the tropics an anglo-saxon cannot be a day laborer. he can’t because he can’t.
there was in mexico no clerical position open to trawnbeigh, because he did not know spanish. it is significant that after fifteen consecutive years of residence in the country none of the trawnbeighs knew spanish. to be, somehow and somewhere, an english country gentleman of a well-known, slightly old-fashioned type was as much trawnbeigh’s destiny as it is the destiny of, say, a polar bear to be a polar bear, or a camel to be a camel. as soon as he got his two thousand pounds he became one.
when i first met them all he had been one for about ten years. i had recently settled in trawnbeigh’s neighborhood, which in mexico means that my ranch was a hard day-and-a-half ride from his, over roads that are not roads but merely ditches full of liquefied mud on the level stretches, and p. 150ditches full of assorted bowlders on the ascents. so, although we looked neighborly on a small map, i might not have had the joy of meeting the trawnbeighs for years if my mule hadn’t gone lame one day when i was making the interminable trip to rebozo.
trawnbeigh’s place was seven miles from the main road, and as i happened to be near the parting of the ways when the off hind leg of catalina began to limp, i decided to leave her with my mozo at an indian village until a pack train should pass by (there is always some one in a pack train who can remove a bad shoe), while i proceeded on the mozo’s mule to the trawnbeighs’. my usual stopping place for the night was five miles farther on, and the indian village was—well, it was an indian village.
he put me up not only that night, but as my mozo didn’t appear until late the next afternoon, a second night as well. and when i at last rode away, it was with the feeling of having learned from the trawnbeighs a great lesson.
in the first place they couldn’t have expected me; they couldn’t possibly have expected any one. and it was a hot afternoon. but as it was the hour at which people at “home” dropped in for tea, mrs. trawnbeigh and her three plain, heavy looking daughters were perfectly prepared to dispense hospitality to any number of mythical friends.
they had on hideous, but distinctly “dressy” dresses of amazingly stamped materials known, i believe, as “summer silks,” and they were all four tightly laced. current fashion in paris, london and new york by no means insisted on small, smooth, round waists, but the trawnbeigh women p. 151had them, because (as it gradually dawned on me) to have had any other kind would have been a concession to anatomy and the weather. to anything so compressible as one’s anatomy, or as vulgarly impartial as the weather, the trawnbeighs simply did not concede. i never could get over the feeling that they all secretly regarded weather in general as a kind of popular institution, of vital importance only to the middle class.
cyril, an extremely beautiful young person of twenty-two, who had been playing tennis (by himself) on the asoleadero, was in “flannels,” and trawnbeigh admirably looked the part in gray, middle-aged riding things, although, as i discovered before leaving, their stable at the time consisted of one senile burro with ingrowing hoofs.
from the first, it all seemed too flawless to be true. i had never visited in england, but i doubt if there is another country whose literature gives one as definite and lasting an impression of its home life. perhaps this is because the life of families of the class to which the trawnbeighs belonged proceeds in england by such a series of definite and traditional episodes.
in a household like theirs, the unexpected must have a devil of a time in finding a chance to happen. for, during my visit, absolutely nothing happened that i hadn’t long since chuckled over when making the acquaintance of jane austen, thackeray, george eliot and anthony trollope; not to mention ouida (it was cyril, of course, who from time to time struck the ouida note), and the more laborious performances of mrs. humphry ward. they all of them did at every tick of the clock precisely what they ought to have done. they were a p. 152page, the least bit crumpled, torn from “half hours with the best authors,” and cast, dear heaven! upon a hillside in darkest mexico.
of course we had tea in the garden. there wasn’t any garden, but we nevertheless had tea in it. the house would have been cooler, less glaring, and free from the venomous little rodadoras that stung the backs of my hands full of microscopic polka dots; but we all strolled out to a spot some fifty yards away where a bench, half a dozen shaky, home made chairs and a rustic table were most imperfectly shaded by three tattered banana trees.
“we love to drink tea in the dingle-dangle,” mrs. trawnbeigh explained. how the tea tray itself got to the dingle-dangle i have only a general suspicion, for when we arrived it was already there, equipped with caddy, cozy, a plate of buttered toast, a pot of strawberry jam and all the rest of it. but, try as i might, i simply could not rid myself of the feeling that at least two footmen had arranged it all and then discreetly retired; a feeling that also sought to account for the tray’s subsequent removal, which took place while trawnbeigh, cyril, edwina and i walked over to inspect the asoleadero and washing tanks. i wanted to look back; but something (the fear, perhaps, of being turned into a pillar of salt) restrained me.
with most english speaking persons in that part of the world, conversation has to do with coffee, coffee and—coffee. the trawnbeighs, however, scarcely touched on the insistent topic. while we sat on the low wall of the dilapidated little asoleadero, we discussed pheasant shooting, and the best places for haberdashery and “gladstone p. 153bags.” cyril, as if it were but a matter of inclination, said he thought he might go over for the shooting that year; a cousin had asked him “to make a seventh.” i never found out what this meant, and didn’t have the nerve to ask.
“bertie shoots the twelfth, doesn’t he?” edwina here inquired.
to which her brother replied, as if she had shown a distressing ignorance of some fundamental date in history, like 1066 or 1215: “bertie always shoots the twelfth.”
the best place for haberdashery, in mr. trawnbeigh’s opinion, was “the stores.” but cyril preferred a small shop in bond street, maintaining firmly, but with good humor, that it was not merely, as “the pater” insisted, because the fellow charged more, but because one didn’t “run the risk of seeing some beastly bounder in a cravat uncommonly like one’s own.” trawnbeigh, as a sedate parent bordering on middle age, felt obliged to stand up for the more economical “stores,” but it was evident that he really admired cyril’s exclusive principles and approved of them. edwina cut short the argument with an abrupt question.
“i say,” she inquired anxiously, “has the dressing bell gone yet?” the dressing bell hadn’t gone, but it soon went, for mr. trawnbeigh, after looking at his watch, bustled off to the house and rang it himself. then we withdrew to our respective apartments to dress for dinner.
“i’ve put you in the north wing, old man; there’s always a breeze in the wing,” my host declared as he ushered me into a bamboo shed they used apparently for storing corn and iron implements of an agricultural nature. but there was p. 154also in the room a recently made up cot with real sheets, a tin bath tub, hot and cold water in two earthenware jars, and an empty packing case upholstered in oilcloth. when trawnbeigh spoke of this last as a “wash-hand-stand,” i knew i had indeed strayed from life into the realms of mid-victorian romance.
the breeze trawnbeigh had referred to developed in the violent mexican way, while i was enjoying the bath tub, into an unmistakable norther. water fell on the roof like so much lead, and then sprang off (some of it did) in thick, round streams from the tin spouts; the wind screamed in and out of the tiles overhead, and through the north wing’s blurred window the writhing banana trees of the dingle-dangle looked like strange things one sees in an aquarium.
as soon as i could get into my clothes again—a bath was as far as i was able to live up to the trawnbeigh ideal—i went into the sala, where the dinner table was already set with a really heartrending attempt at splendor. i have said that nothing happened with which i had not a sort of literary acquaintance; but i was wrong. while i was standing there wondering how the trawnbeighs had been able all those years to “keep it up,” a window in the next room blew open with a bang. i ran in to shut it; but before i reached it, i stopped short and, as hastily and quietly as i could, tiptoed back to the “wing.” for the next room was the kitchen, and at one end of it trawnbeigh, in a shabby but perfectly fitting dress coat, his trousers rolled up half way to his knees, was patiently holding an umbrella over his wife’s sacred dinner gown, while she—be-bangled, p. 155be-cameoed, be-plumed, and stripped to the buff—masterfully cooked our dinner on the brassero.
to me it was all extremely wonderful, and the wonder of it did not lessen during the five years in which, on my way to and from rebozo, i stopped over at the trawnbeighs’ several times a year. for, although i knew that they were often financially all but down and out, the endless red tape of their daily life never struck me as being merely a pathetic bluff. their rising bells and dressing bells, their apparent dependence on all sorts of pleasant accessories that simply did not exist, their occupations (i mean those on which i did not have to turn a tactful back, such as botanizing, crewel work, painting horrible water colors and composing long lists of british sounding things to be “sent out from the stores”), the informality with which we waited on ourselves at luncheon and the stately, punctilious manner in which we did precisely the same thing at dinner, the preordained hour at which mrs. trawnbeigh and the girls each took a bedroom candle and said good night, leaving trawnbeigh, cyril and me to smoke a pipe and “do a whisky peg” (trawnbeigh had spent some years in india), the whole inflexibly insular scheme of their existence was more, infinitely more, than a bluff. it was a placid, tenacious clinging to the straw of their ideal in a great, deep sea of poverty, discomfort and desolation.
and it had its reward, for after fourteen years of mexican life, cyril was almost exactly what he would have been had he never seen the place; and cyril was the trawnbeighs’ one asset of immense value. he was most agreeable to look at, he was both related to and connected with many of the p. 156most historical sounding ladies and gentlemen in england, and he had just the limited, selfish, amiable outlook on the world in general that was sure (granting the other things) to impress miss irene slapp, of pittsburgh, as the height of both breeding and distinction.
irene slapp had beauty and distinction of her own. somehow, although they all needed the money, i don’t believe cyril would have married her if she hadn’t. anyhow, one evening in the city of mexico he took her in to dinner at the british legation, where he had been asked to dine as a matter of course, and before the second entrée miss slapp was slightly in love with him and very deeply in love with the scheme of life, the standard, the ideal, or whatever you choose to call it, he had inherited and had been brought up, under staggering difficulties, to represent.
“the young beggar has made a pot of money in the states,” trawnbeigh gravely informed me after cyril had spent seven weeks in pittsburgh—whither he had been persuaded to journey on the slapps’s private train.
“and, you know, i’ve decided to sell the old place,” he casually remarked a month or so later. “yes, yes,” he went on, “the young people are beginning to leave us” (i hadn’t noticed any signs of impending flight on the part of edwina, violet and maud). “mrs. trawnbeigh and i want to end our days at home. slapp believes there’s gold on the place—or would it be petroleum? he’s welcome to it. after all, i’ve never been fearfully keen on business.”
and i rode away pondering, as i always did, on the great lesson of the trawnbeighs.
charles macomb flandrau.
